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This video workshop consists of 39 videos totaling almost 3.5 hours of companion video, and covers topics such as RESTful controllers, forms processing using Laravel 5’s new form requests feature, Less CSS and CoffeeScript compilation with Elixir, the Blade templating engine, Eloquent, and much, much more. Learn more about the workshop here.

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Table of Contents

Easy Laravel 5 is divided into twelve chapters and two appendices covering the fundamental topics most critical to today’s Laravel developer.

Chapter 1. Introducing Laravel

In this opening chapter you’ll learn how to create and configure your Laravel project both using your existing PHP development environment and Laravel Homestead. I’ll also show you how to properly configure your environment for effective Laravel debugging, and how to expand Laravel’s capabilities by installing several third-party Laravel packages that promise to supercharge your development productivity. We’ll conclude the chapter with an introduction to PHPUnit, showing you how to create and execute your first Laravel unit test!

In this chapter you’ll learn how to create controllers and actions, and define the routes used to access your application endpoints using Laravel 5’s new route annotations feature. You’ll also learn how to create the pages (views), work with variable data and logic using the Blade templating engine, and reduce redundancy using layouts and view helpers. I’ll also introduce Laravel Elixir, a new feature for managing Gulp tasks, and show you how to integrate the popular Bootstrap front-end framework and jQuery JavaScript library. We’ll conclude the chapter with several examples demonstrating how to test your controllers and views using PHPUnit.

Chapter 3. Talking to the Database

In this chapter we’ll turn our attention to the project’s data. You’ll learn how to integrate and configure the database, create and manage models, and interact with the database through your project models. You’ll also learn how to deftly configure and traverse model relations, allowing you to greatly reduce the amount of SQL you’d otherwise have to write to integrate a normalized database into your application.

Chapter 4. Model Relations, Scopes, and Other Advanced Features

Building and navigating table relations is a standard part of the development process even when working on the most unambitious of projects, yet this task is often painful when working with many web frameworks. Fortunately, using Laravel it’s easy to define and traverse these relations. In this chapter I’ll show you how to define, manage, and interact with one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, has many through, and polymorphic relations. You’ll also learn about a great feature known as scopes which encapsulate the logic used for more advanced queries, thereby hiding it from your controllers.

Chapter 5. Integrating Web Forms

Your application will almost certainly contain at least a few web forms, which will likely interact with the models, meaning you’ll require a solid grasp on Laravel’s form generation and processing capabilities. While creating simple forms is fairly straightforward, things can complicated fast when implementing more ambitious solutions such as forms involving multiple models. In this chapter I’ll go into extensive detail regarding how you can integrate forms into your Laravel applications, introducing Laravel 5’s new form requests feature, covering both Laravel’s native form generation solutions as well as several approaches offered by popular packages. You’ll also learn how to upload files using a web form and Laravel’s fantastic file upload capabilities.

Chapter 6. Integrating Middleware

Laravel 5 introduces middleware integration. In this chapter I’ll introduce you to the concept of middleware and the various middleware solutions bundled into Laravel 5. You’ll also learn how to create your own middleware solution!

Chapter 7. Authenticating and Managing Your Users

Most modern applications offer user registration and preference management features in order to provide customized, persisted content and settings. In this chapter you’ll learn how to integrate user registration, login, and account management capabilities into your Laravel application.

Chapter 8. Deploying, Optimizing and Maintaining Your Application

“Deploy early and deploy often” is an oft-quoted mantra of successful software teams. To do so you’ll need to integrate a painless and repeatable deployment process, and formally define and schedule various maintenance-related processes in order to ensure your application is running in top form. In this chapter I’ll introduce the Laravel 5 Command Scheduler, which you can use to easily schedule rigorously repeating tasks. I’ll also talk about optimization, demonstrating how to create a faster class router and how to cache your application routes. Finally, I’ll demonstrate just how easy it is to deploy your Laravel application to the popular hosting service Heroku, and introduce Laravel Forge.

Chapter 9. Creating a Restricted Administration Console

This chapter shows you how to identify certain users as administrators and then grant them access to a restricted web-based administrative console using a prefixed route grouping and custom middleware.

Chapter 10. Introducing the Lumen Microframework

This chapter introduces the new Laravel Lumen microframework. You’ll learn all about Lumen fundamentals while building a companion microservice for the TODOParrot companion application!

Chapter 12. Introducing Vue.js

Vue.js has become the Laravel community’s de facto JavaScript library, and for good reason; it shares many of the practical, productive attributes Laravel developers have come to love. Chapter 12 introduces Vue.js’ fundamental features, and shows you how to integrate highly interactive and eye-appealing interfaces into your Laravel application.

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